804 
PASSIONAL 200L0GY. 
men and ladies who still regret the delights of lost paradise, but 
I confess never to have well understood how a man of sense could 
envy the social position of our first parents, unless from an exag- 
gerated passion for natural history, and a fine assortment of ci- 
gars. The happiness of the Edenians was not due to the inter- 
diction of love, on the contrary ; the happiness of Eden was com- 
posite, though only of the first degree. 
It rested passionally upon the unlimited liberty of love, on the 
absence of prejudices (innocence), and especially on the right of 
carelessness, this precious right that nature grants to the child and 
the savage, and refuses to the barbarian and the civilizee. 
It is difficult to make the corrupted people of the present social 
phase understand that liberty in love, that liberty of choice, is the 
first condition of the dignity of woman, and the happiness of man. 
The imagination of these beings, profoundly gangrened with mor- 
alism and hypocrisy, will not admit the compatibility of liberty 
in love with modesty, supreme charm of the feminine sex, and 
which decuples the price of the conquests of love. 
These moralists, who are for the most part old and ugly 
enough, are persuaded that if at this moment all women were 
emancipated, these unfortunates would come and throw them- 
selves on their necks. How gratuitous an illusion ! Just heaven ! 
Let them grant us only the law of divorce, they will see. 
Materially, the happiness of the Edenians reposed on the per- 
fect equilibrium of temperature, on the abundance of all the fruits 
of the earth, and the absence of capital. Equilibrium of tempera- 
ture was the cause that for the whole duration of this period, 
colds in the head and catarrhs, sources of so many diseases, were 
totally unknown, whence those frequent examples of fabulous lon- 
gevity which astonish us in the history of our first parents. Then 
the average length of human life was measured by centuries, and 
love still bloomed in the one hundredth year. The stature of 
man approached seven feet, that of woman five and a half. The 
abundance of fr'uit which nature, prodigal of her gifts, suspended 
of her own love above man’s mouth, dispensed him from labor, 
and conferred upon him the happy right of carelessness. Finally, 
capital, which gives the right to idleness and parasitism, was not 
